Leaderboard Zone

Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix, which I wrote of glowingly here, called me earlier today to break the news: His company is selling a 75% stake to three major newspaper businesses: Gannett, Knight Ridder, and the Tribune Company. None of the new companies will have the ability to control the company, and this alone says volumes about how Web 2.0 is terrifying the newspaper industry. They can’t even buy their competition outright!

Rich would not give me a ballpark valuation, but given that he has real revenues and a scalable model with OEM potential (in terms of optimizing contextual ads and local), I’d wager it was pretty good – better than Flickr, perhaps.

I’m just in from a few whirlwind days at PCForum, which had a lot of search in it. I’ll be digesting this news, as well as PCForum thoughts, over the next few days. Meanwhile, the Topix release is in extended entry.

None of the new companies will have the ability to control the company, and this alone says volumes about how Web 2.0 is terrifying the newspaper industry. They can’t even buy their competition outright!

Um, as Tony suggests, I think this isn’t a “couldn’t” but rather a “shouldn’t” or “oughtn’t”. Just like Jeff Jarvis is whining for Google News transparency, if Topix.net majority ownership was by a mass-media company, someone would shout “biased selection!” even if it weren’t true.

This play is a GREAT way for Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune to provide financial support for Topix.net without appearing to have any direct influence over the company. It’s essentially the modern-day form of “paying the paper-boy” — if Topix.net directs traffic to these online newspapers, it’s essentially the same “job” as the traditional paper-boy, schlepping newspapers door to door to subscribers.

Either way, I echo Bob Wyman’s praise and congratulations to Rich Skrenta and the other folks at Topix.net — well done!

You should check the comment from Vin Crosbie to that item. He strongly disagrees with your assertion, “None of the new companies will have the ability to control the company.” He’d like some further clarification on that. It would be great if you could pop in over there and respond to him.